That's What I Think: No work, no pay, thanks to politicians

Saturday

Oct 5, 2013 at 11:00 AM

This week at my day job, an ole boy I used to work with came in and said, “I’m without a job.” He left the company where I work during the day to go to work at Fort Leonard Wood a couple of years ago, as have a lot of my former co-workers. Thanks to the politicians, he and the rest of them are out of work for awhile, while I keep toilng in the private sector to pay taxes.

R.D. Hohenfeldt

This week at my day job, an ole boy I used to work with came in and said, “I’m without a job.” He left the company where I work during the day to go to work at Fort Leonard Wood a couple of years ago, as have a lot of my former co-workers. Thanks to the politicians, he and the rest of them are out of work for awhile, while I keep toilng in the private sector to pay taxes.That means no paycheck for men and women with children to feed and clothe. That means no money to pay the electric bill, the water bill, the gas bill. That’s no money to buy gasoline to put into the car.I wonder what the ripple effect of this shutdown will be in precise financial terms? From time to time we have scares that Fort Leonard Wood is going to shut down or be cut back severely, and we’re warned that the consequences for Phelps and Pulaski counties will be dire. Rolla has lots of government workers, not as many as it once did, and harming their income will harm some local stores, I suppose. No doubt about it, we need to operate the country with a balanced budget, and Obamacare is probably a bad idea, but throwing people out of their jobs suddenly isn’t right.I wish there were a way to do harm to the personal finances of all the representatives and the senators and the president. They are not worth what they receive as they enrich themselves 24/7, and they have no idea of the financial pain they are putting people through.Down in Georgia, 4,000 employees at Warner Robins Air Force Base are on furlough, so some Houston County, Ga., and surrounding businesses are offering discounts to help out those non-working employees. Presumably, businesses in Phelps and Pulaski counties are doing the same or are thinking about it to help out federal employees.A guy at work the other day read something off his computer at lunch that said something like this: “Just a few weeks ago both political parties were clamoring to spend money to bomb Syria. Now we don’t have enough money to run the government.”

A girl at work read something off the Internet that claims President Obama has declared November to be Muslim Appreciation Month. If you hear that, don’t believe it. It is fake news. Much of what you read on the Internet is fake. It is not just wrong, mistaken or poorly reported. It is contrived, made up, faked, planted and then picked up and reprinted on thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of websites. The Internet, though, is the information medium of choice for many people, especially the young.

I wrote a column recently about what I thought of heaven. A reader wrote a long letter to the editor, so long that it goes beyond our word limits for letters. We wanted to run it as a guest commentary and both Editor Hackbarth and I sent emails to the reader asking him to submit a picture or let us take his picture to run with his guest commentary. He did not reply, and the management insists that guest commentaries include photos of the authors.Here’s an excerpt, though: “Mr. Hohenfeldt’s article appearing in the Rolla Daily News on 14-15 September, 2013 left the reader with a serious unresolved issue. The article seemed to carry a rather strong anti-church attitude, laced into a fairly accurate portrayal of most people’s misconception of heaven. While I myself do not profess allegiance to any protestant religious organization, I am a devout Christian and a serious student of scripture. In my humble opinion Mr. Hohenfeldt put far too much effort into … attempting to portray himself as some kind of religious rebel who brings shock and awe to a congregation of Baptists. In fact, so much time was given to this rather boorish attempt at self-illumination that the real theme of the article was left completely unresolved.”He then spent several hundred words resolving that issue, according to his own theology. I’m sure you would have loved to read it.

Another reader, an ole boy I consider a friend, also wrote me a personal note about that same column, in which I noted that I did not believe the earth was created in six days in 4004 B.C. He wrote: “In a future column you might throw out a little thing known as continental drift, which was just a theory in the ’60s when I attended UMR under Dr. Tom Beveridge’s Geology I class, which as you know states that good old Missouri was once part of a much larger supercontinent called Pangea during the early Mesozoic Era about 300 million years ago, then Pangea began breaking up about 200 million years ago to form the present six continents and the North American continent began drifting north to its present location…oops there we go again with our millions and billions of years…forgot that it all happened in 6,000 years…about when the Egyptians were building the Great Pyramid of Cheops…oops again...how could that be…our math must be messed up...that’s what happens when two boys grow up in the Ozarks...we drink too much of that polluted well…Plus I went to a one-room school house for four years during my 1-4th grades…that must be the real root of my poor math!”